Tad Davis writes:

Kudos for the review of Inspiration. I've been a user of this program for some time, and was in fact one of the beta testers for the most recent version. Your review was thorough, and it gave a nicely balanced sense of the product - both its strengths and its weaknesses. I was particularly glad to see the attention you gave to "Families," which is something unique to Inspiration.

I HAVE used the other outlining programs. Inspiration's outlining feature set compares favorably to MORE's: it won't "clone" topics into more than one heading, but it does allow you to "hoist" and "dehoist" topics for uncluttered focus on a single idea. (This is somewhat like the concept of Families, but not quite.) The one major advantage that MORE has is speed. Inspiration accepts typing sluggishly.

Note that I'm talking only about the outlining stuff here. MORE certainly has many slide-show features that Inspiration lacks. On the other hand, you can use Inspiration to create free-form flow-charts, bubble charts, idea maps, and other kinds of diagrams; MORE is basically limited to fancy variations on structure charts and bullet charts. Inspiration's flowcharting features compare favorably with those of many stand-alone flowchart programs. If you're a programmer or systems analyst, you can use it to create professional-looking flowcharts, data flow diagrams, data structure diagrams, and so forth. One particularly interesting feature here is that you can label the lines that connect one entity with another; and when you move the entity or the lines around, the labels go with them.

Disclaimer: apart from my brief venture as a beta tester, I have no connection with Ceres Software, other than as a fan.

Information from:
Tad Davis -- davist@a1.relay.upenn.edu